Monday, June 28, 2004

As part of the new Exchange 2003 tools, there is a new administration tool that gives you access via a web interface to all those sneaky (and often not well documented) OWA interface settings. I have played with this some and it is pretty cool.

Feel like spending a few minutes learning something new? Add How Stuff Works to your favorites list and spend a few minutes every so often out here reading about things you have always wondered about. I really enjoy this site.

Sunday, June 27, 2004

Well, this weekend I went and saw Farenheit 9/11 at the urging of a few friends. Hummm....

A few years ago mother sent me Michael Moore's "Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!" Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big supported of George W. Bush, but all this book did was convince me that Michael Moore was a bitter, blithering idiot. I only read part of each chapter before I got disgusted with it and put it down. Michael: Get over it! A lot of people did not like it, but George W. Bush WON the election.

At the end of movie, my roommate, Matt, commented that the movie certainly could not be considered a documentary. It was way too one-sided. I agree.

What does concern me is how factual the information is in that movie. Most of the information, I did know already. Including the information about the bin Laden family being 'escorted' out of the country on Sept 12 (when all airlines were grounded.) The Bush families business associations with a number of Saudi families does trouble me though. There was a number of things that Michael Moore did leave out that I wondered by, including anything about Neil Bush.

Anyway, if you are a hard-core Democrat, you will probably love this movie. If you are a hard-core Republican, you won't make it through the first 10 minutes. Those of us in the 'moderate middle' are kind of left scratching our heads and wondering how much of it is truly factual.

Saturday, June 26, 2004

I just finished The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. I must say I found this a fairly enjoyable book. It is not, as one of my friends says, the best book ever, but I would put it in the top 10 works of fiction I have ever read. I like Dan Brown's style. His paragraphs are concise and read quickly. It makes a good book to pick up before going to bed; except that several times when my roommate read it, he just kept reading until 3:00AM.

It takes place in Paris and London with an interesting and unpredictable cast of characters. Much of this book revolves around art, churches, and religious history. It serves to emphasize to me that I have an "engineer's education." Heavy on the math and science, but light on liberal arts, history, and Europe.

I highly recommend this to anyone that wants a good "hard to put down" read. If you are really religious, you need to keep in mind that this is fiction and it takes some creative liberties with some historical information. That does not bother me, but one of friends was troubled by the book possibly being represented as 'historical fiction'.

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

The mobile Device Update adds new mobile devices and mobile browsers to the list of supported Outlook Mobile Access mobile devices. This may help resolve some weird or flakey problems some of your users are having when the connect to your OMA server.

Sunday, June 20, 2004

Jay Leno on finding Osama bin Laden

"A new poll says that if the elections were held today, John Kerry would beat President Bush by a double digit margin. The White House is so worried about this, they're now thinking of moving up the capture of Osama bin Laden to next month."

Wednesday, June 09, 2004

Preventing some users from sending Internet mail in Exchange 2000/2003

In Exchange 5.5, it was reasonably easy to keep a user from sending or receiving SMTP mail. You just deleted their SMTP address and told the Internet Mail Service. However, with Exchange 2000 and 2003, all users require an SMTP address. You have to get a little trickier.

You need to define a recipient policy that applies to users that you don't want to have external mail addresses. You need to put those folks in a group, and you need to restrict that group from using the SMTP Connector(s). And, you need to make sure that the SMTP Connector recognizes those restrictions. See Microsoft KB 277872 for more information.

Ben obviously spends a lot of time searching the Web for good deals. And he finds them. He finds some awesome deals without a lot of the fluff that comes along with other 'freebie' and bargain sites. Ben's Bargains - Where ghetto dogs come for the lowdown on deals (that is Ben's description, not mine.) The site is updated several times a day.

I have been an almost daily visitor to this site for months and have found a lot of great deals. Thanks to Jordan Chang for introducing this site to me.